Ruth Simmons was born into an East Texas family of sharecroppers in the 1940s. In her 2005 commencement speech at the University of Vermont, excerpted here, she describes experiences that helped her escape the poverty and discrimination of her youth to become the president of Brown University.

James Lusk, a white man from Alabama, abandoned the Republican Party in 1874. He gave this explanation to a former political associate, noting that "no white man can live in the South in the future and act with any other than the Democratic party unless he is willing and prepared to live a life of social isolation and remain in political oblivion...the die is cast."